October 2012

Tuesday, 30 October 2012

The final question at a talk on civil discourse by James A. Baker
at the Wilson Center on Monday, October 23, 2012
raised the specter of another razor-thin election reminiscent of 2000. A subsequent headline in the Washington Post suggested that the 2012
presidential election is so close that the Electoral College could split evenly
between Obama and Romney. Later, the
revised headline which more accurately describes the story was that the popular
vote and the Electoral College vote could be at odds but this time with Obama
winning the Electoral College and Romney the popular vote.

Baker, of course, was a controversial figure in the 2000 presidential
elections. He was the lawyer who led the
Republican legal challenge to the Democratic call for a recount of the vote in
several Florida
counties. The recount - had the Supreme
Court allowed it to proceed - might well have resulted in a changed Electoral
College result that not only would have reflected the popular vote but also changed
the political and economic complexion of this country and its role in and
perception of it in the world.

In short,
without Bush 43rd’s ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in and of itself, a costly and difficult
war would have been avoided and the US would have remained a largely
benevolent power in the minds of most foreigners.

In retrospect, the Democratic Party’s mistakes that fateful night
were two: 1) to call for only a selective
county recount, and, 2) in my estimation, appoint Warren Christopher to lead
its legal challenge. I never thought Christopher
was a strong Secretary of State whereas Baker was and I thought even at the
time that the Democrats would have done far better to appoint a far more aggressive
lawyer to lead their legal challenge in 2000.

Back to 2000

I spent elections night 2000 on the 93rd floor of
World Trade Center Tower Two – a place that sadly no longer exists – as New
Mexico State Manager for Voter News Service, a national vote reporting and
predictions organization that sadly also no longer exists. At the time, New Mexico
was both a swing and a Bell
Weather State.
I also happened to work in the same room as the Florida State Manager.

This year New
Mexico is solid blue so how our voters vote doesn’t
really matter to the campaigns this year except for a fight over a Senate seat
which - if the US Chamber of Commerce has its way - would turn from blue to red. But even with all the Chamber money thrown
in, the polls continue to show Democratic Congressman Martin Heinrich well
ahead - thus far, at least. Occasionally
common sense does trump money even in the craziness of American politics.

In 2000, New
Mexico was so closely divided in the presidential
polls that every one of our votes mattered.
It took about a month for all the New
Mexico votes to be counted before the state was narrowly
declared Blue. Our major culprit was the then incompetent Republican Bernalillo
County Clerk (the state’s largest county) famous for declaring that she never
finished the count. This time she ultimately had to – despite a lost ballot box
locked in some out of the way closet, a wayward box that mysteriously turned up
about a month later when, of course, it no longer mattered.

Due to their blatant incompetency both she and
her elections manager were gone by elections 2002 and we’ve elected Democratic
County Clerks ever since. By the time the missing ballots were found, however,
I had been back in New Mexico for about a
month and the real fight over the nation’s future had remained centered on Florida.

I don’t blame Baker for the outcome – he did his job all too
well - but I do blame Florida’s
then Secretary of State. One of the many problems with US elections is that
they are run by politically partisan state and county officials who themselves
have a stake in the outcome. Nevertheless,
most of all I blame the US Supreme Court, then as now controlled by judges
appointed by Republican presidents, which never, repeat, never should have even
agreed to hear the case.

Unfortunately, the highest Court is still
controlled – 5 to 4 – by the Republicans but let’s hope that if the elections balance
on a knife’s edge yet again, that the justices exhibit better judgment this
time around and stay out. I’m skeptical,
however, that the once burned, twice shy rule will play out. The high court five already caused enough
havoc earlier this year by upholding “Citizens United” (a 5-4 decision) which
has resulted in the flooding of the campaigns with SUPERPAC money largely favoring
the Republicans. More than 80% of these funds it turns out, come from fewer
than 200 of America’s richest – according, at least, to a study cited in the October
13 Economist.

As the Economist also
pointed out in another article in the magazine’s same special section that this
approach to politics is just a step away from “The Gilded Age,” a time near the
end of the nineteenth century when corporate America blatantly bought
politicians outright before a depression brought on by their profligacy ushered
in a populist reaction that swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. This depression hit my ancestors so hard that
my grandmother was denied her chance to study at Radcliffe College
or ever get beyond a high school education because the family could no longer
afford it. The depression of the 1930s –
following the “Roaring Twenties” - another Republican “gilded age” - denied my
mother-in-law of a college education she too desperately wanted and deserved
for the same reason.

Back on the 93rd floor, however, VNS called Florida for Al Gore
because, in fact, that’s what the VNS predictions formula indicated. Exit
polling, which was part of the formula, in and of itself is notoriously
accurate (far more than pre-elections polls).
The VNS call came late in the evening: and, to repeat, the figures being
reported from Florida
substantiated it. The VNS formula which
factored in a number of indicators including select precinct reporting too may
not have been perfect – but, in reality it was likely better than what we have
now since VNS was destroyed by the major US news media that had funded it for
20 or more years and gave AP sole control of the process thereafter (which
decided it didn’t need precinct reporting or a separate check on its own county
reporters).

Here’s today’s problem:
The quagmire in Florida could repeat itself – the Republicans have been
working hard to make it so - through that party’s perennial insistence upon
denying poorer voters the franchise - at least those more likely to vote for the
Democrats despite the fact that study after study has shown that electoral
fraud perpetrated by ineligible voters is almost nonexistent.

Monday, 29 October 2012

We’ve had lots of fun at Mitt Romney’s expense lately. His verbal ineptitude, unlike George W. Bush’s fairly innocent malapropisms, stems from ideology and the usual tone-deafness of the privileged classes, and he deserves the ridicule. The latest (though only semi-amusing) is watching him trying to position himself advantageously vis-à-vis his rape-justifying fellow Republicans, who worship God, Nature and Fate through violated women. Are these guys—Halloween being mere days away—ghoulish or not?

On an only slightly less macabre note, Romney’s aides, needing names of potential Cabinet appointees for the newly elected Governor of Massachusetts, produced a list that was male, male, male. Not to worry! When instructed to look in the kitchen or wherever for qualified women, the staffers managed to come up with lots of “women in binders.” (Which is a pretty good description of female life under a not- quite-dead patriarchy, actually.)

Evidently New York Times reporter/columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his rarefied sources at the elite echelons of American economics and finance are similarly challenged.

Two Major Openings

The new president, whether surnamed Obama or Romney, will have to appoint a Secretary of the Treasury and also, pretty quickly, a new Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Tim Geitner has indicated that he won’t serve a second term at Treasury. Ditto Ben Bernanke at the Fed. Naturally any enterprising financial reporter or columnist will be tempted to play seer by predicting the winners (or at least the leading candidates) of the competition for these crucial jobs and often thankless honors.

Where are the Women?

Sorkin’s list of possibles for both openings is decidedly unimaginative. It’s also drearily predictable when it comes to any notion that there may be superbly well qualified women out there in the world of budgets, balance sheets, deficits, taxes, GNP, GDP, marginal this and marginal that, etc. To say nothing of those dirty (in some realms) concepts touching on income distribution and economic justice. The glass ceiling in the U.S. financial world is as shatterproof as promotion ceilings seem to get.

When it comes to the Fed, Sorkin is not only predictably misogynist, he betrays the bias that has made his financial reporting of the banking crisis so cramped. He’s pushing his boy Tim Geitner so strongly that he mentions only in passing the Fed’s extremely capable second in command, Janet Yellen. All Sorkin manages to say about her is that she’d provide “continuity.” Actually, it’s very interesting to look at Geitner and Yellen side by side.

Yellen, Geitner and the Big Problem

Yellen’s pre-Washington service is every bit as distinguished and relevant as Geitner’s. He was President of the Fed’s branch in New York, Yellen of the Fed in San Francisco, positives to be taken seriously. The negatives are as follows: Geitner was and is too close to Citibank, Goldman and other big bank financial players, all of which (and whom) have been coddled throughout the banking crisis; Yellen was part of the Bernanke regime that was disinclined to take action on the housing bubble when disaster might still have been averted.

This would put Geitner and Yellen roughly even as candidates for Fed leadership, if not for one strong negative attaching to Geitner that’s hard to argue away. The Federal Reserve system needs to be insulated from partisan politics (which is not to aim for for some impossible disconnect or total naivete). It would seriously undermine the health of the financial system for anyone to move directly from being Secretary of the Treasury to becoming Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, especially if his previous boss had just been re-elected to the presidency. That’s just too cozy for comfort. Yellen, on the other hand, is equally competent, far more experienced in the ways of the Fed and would likely find it easier to steer clear of narrow political considerations in making systemic decisions under a president of either party. Why does Sorkin miss this? Is he biased against females? For Geitner?

Why Was Bair Invisible?

Moving on to the second major opening, I note that Sorkin does not mention Sheila Bair as a highly credible candidate for Secretary of the Treasury under a president from either major party. As head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, she took issue with an incredibly lenient Tim Geitner and, although she identifies as a “lifelong Republican” and “capitalist,” called for higher bank capitalization, much tougher regulation of securitization and real penalties for arrogant, rule-breaking bankers. Is that why, given Sorkin's sympathy for Geitner during the darkest days of the past decade, he fails to proffer Bair as a candidate for the top Treasury or Fed role? On the other hand, maybe the omission is payback on Sorkin’s part. He’s the only journalist singled out for biased economic and financial reporting in Bair’s hard-hitting, straight-talking memoir of her five plus years as FDIC chief. That’s Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself (2012)

Thursday, 25 October 2012

Tory Whip Andrew Mitchell resigned 19 October, a month after losing his cool in what became known as “Plebgate.” Within 24 hours railway officials caught Chancellor George Osborne in first class with a standard ticket, the second time in five months. An embarrassed Lord Norman Tebbit, an old hand with a serious Tory pedigree attacked the “dog of a Coalition government.” The Daily Mail asked, “Who do they think they are?”

The question resonates with the British

From Plebgate to LOLgate with Savile in between, Britain reels from the shock of one bad headline after another.

Recently ITV revealed that the late Sir Jimmy Savile -- a BBC icon for more than a generation -- may have been a serial pedophile. Subsequent police investigation has already confirmed Savile was for over 50 years a predatory pedophile of epic proportions. BBC & organizations for which Savile was a patron stand accused of enabling the conduct and protecting the secret. It may be the most serious crisis for the BBC in half a century.

Last week also revealed 27 MPs let their homes in order to rent another, whereby they could justify taxpayer reimbursement for “expenses.”

Prime Minister Cameron withheld from the Leveson Hearing emails he sent Rebekah Brooks. Cameron claims “advice of counsel.” He argues the emails were “not relevant" to the hearing.

The Attorney General announced he would not release Prince Charles’ famous (or infamous) “Black Spider letters” (so named for the scrawl not the secrecy). The Guardian requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The Attorney General justified it to Parliament as necessary to protect Prince Charles’ “neutrality” in his future role as King.

One wonders. If protecting Prince Charles’ credibility was the reason, why did the Attorney General choose a very public forum to say release would damage the future King’s neutrality? Incompetence, Lord Tebbit? Perhaps the Mail uncovered a reason. Recent letters focus on promoting green alternative energy and fuel. One can see why a Conservative government would worry about his neutrality. They would, wouldn't they.

Why is Prince Charles any less free than me to speak his mind? What other multimillionaire is expected to refrain from influencing policy? It may not be wise for the monarchy, but now it seems a perverse freedom that denies freedom of expression to anyone.

Regardless, one point does remain. Prince Charles is a taxpayer funded public figure expressing opinions about public policy. Refusing to release only plays into a growing sense that a culture of "I can get away with anything. I'm untouchable” is out of control, rampant and blatantly uncaring who knows it.

If the idea was to divert attention from government, it failed spectacularly.

I can get away with anything. I'm untouchable.

Working poor who do not receive benefits, the British media, and Conservative politicians complain regularly about “something for nothing culture.” Move aside “something for nothing culture.” The new concern is the “I can get away with anything” culture at “the top” of society.

Thursday, 18 October 2012

What is one to do when Inconvenient Fact won’t accept its proper "place"? What do you do when the facts just stubbornly refuse to bow to convenient and conventional policy, driven by focus group and ideology? These questions beleaguer international leadership today, no where more so than in Europe and the United Kingdom.

Troubling facts ignored for happy headlines

17 Sep 2012, BBC announced a 50,000 person reduction in “unemployment.” BBC commentators celebrated the highest number of persons “in employment” in the history of records.

BBC commentators openly opined it would be difficult for Labour to do anything to sully the moment for the Prime Minister.

Somehow Labour managed. Labour leader Ed Milliband pointed out the uncomfortably inconvenient fact that long term unemployment is at its highest level since the last terrible time in British economic history.

Awkward. Bad Labour.

But Labour could have pointed out much more

As the day went on BBC allowed -- albeit buried in the detail -- the unsettling facts that half the increase in employment consisted of “part time” employees, some of whom under government programmes earn no wage at all. “Independent Contractors” are the largest growth factor for “in employment.”

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

The following piece was produced for the Times of India. WhirledView fans might also find it interesting.

Political satire thrives in the United States. It flourishes in print, on the web and on stage.

“What’s bad for the country is good for us,” says political cartoonist Jonathan Richards. Corruption, absurdity, hypocrisy, injustice, pretentiousness, power-mongering, bigotry, racism, sexism, nepotism, cruelty, greed—all the malignancies of abused power, whether political, economic or religious, are legitimate targets of political satire in the U.S.

“Stupid, self-seeking public figures serve it up to us, ” continues Richards, who cartoons on line for the Huffington Post as well as for the daily Albuquerque Journal. Public figures who complain about satirical treatment—and they always do—get little sympathy in the U.S. “If you can’t stand the heat,” Americans say, “get out of the kitchen.”

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly last month, U.S. President Barack Obama reaffirmed the American Constitution’s prohibition against abridging free speech. “Here in the United States, countless publications provoke offense,” he said. “I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day...and I will always defend their right to do so.”

American commitment to unfettered expression, informative, banal or offensive, is deeply rooted. In 1733, John Peter Zenger, a German-American publisher in New York, was charged with criminal libel for criticizing the royal governor. A jury composed of rebellious colonials ignored the judge’s instructions. They rendered a verdict of not guilty. Truth, they held, is an absolute defense against charges of libel or slander. Still, the battle for press freedom never ends. Flash forward to a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan established the actual malice standard which requires the injured party to prove that a publisher acted knowingly and in reckless disregard of truth or falsity. Since ignorance is a defense, angry public figures rarely win such cases. This tolerant legal regime protects cartoonists as well as word-wielders.

Political satire has animated American politics since pre-independence days. Benjamin Franklin, inventor, journalist and diplomat as well as a Founding Father, was mercilessly caricatured. Cartoons criticizing Abraham Lincoln’s person and presidency were scurrilous. Later in the 19th century the Fat Cats of the Gilded Age and their political allies were ridiculed by cartoonists with populist sympathies. Even the “good” World War II against fascism gave rise to satire. Bill Mauldin skewered pompous generals, clueless lieutenants, military bureaucracy and Army food through his “dogface” cartoons featuring Joe and Willie, a rumpled, unshaven pair of privates in the infantry. The absurdities of the air war against the Germans were lampooned in Joseph Heller’s unforgettable novel Catch 22. Herblock, adored for his political cartoons in the Washington Post, kept politicians, plutocrats, preachers and other self-aggrandizing hypocrites off guard for over a half century.

Sometimes contemporary satire is so subtle it’s hard to read. The Onion specializes in deadpan humor that’s especially difficult for foreigners to decipher. An Iranian news agency republished a story about a non-existent survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. The Beijing Evening News presented, as straightforward news, a story claiming that members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the
capitol building underwent a make-over that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome. The item was really a spoof about legislators’ misplaced priorities.

Meanwhile, the comedy troupe performing as The Capital Steps has been “putting the mock in democracy” for the past 31 years. Setting witty political verse to familiar tunes, these comics fill theaters coast to coast. “Take the Money and Run—for President,” the title of the current review, takes aim at the obscene amounts of money now pouring into presidential campaign coffers, a theme that’s evident in the print media, too. A cartoon in The New Yorker depicts a flag-flanked candidate opening his campaign remarks like this: “My fellow-investors.....” A New Yorker cover features a stereotypical plutocrat offering a lollipop to a baby in patched diapers.

Saturday Night Live is the granddaddy of televised political humor. Equally popular these days are The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Politicians are delighted to be invited for an on-air grilling by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Exposure to huge audiences is one draw, but there’s also this: Americans admire politicians able to give as well as take when it comes to word play. In a sports-loving nation being a good sport is almost as important as winning.

Political humor in the U.S. works like a home improvement commercial. “This needs fixing,” satirists imply. “Fix it up.” Eventually, the people do. They throw the rascals out. They pass a better law.

As editor William P. Kiehl points out in the introduction to
The Last Three Feet, despite the vast
number of reports and books written about American public diplomacy since the
demise of the US Information Agency in 1999 and in the aftermath of 9/11 not a
single study has focused on what public diplomacy officers actually do in the
field.

This despite an image of the US that plummeted with its invasion of Iraq
in March 2003 and continued to scrape the bottom of the barrel until Obama was
elected in 2008 rising abruptly thereafter in Europe and several other
countries but not throughout most of the Middle East or much of the Islamic
world besides Indonesia – and as very recent polling shows - Libya.

This small, readable volume seeks to redress the void. The Last Three Feet is not about Washington
operations – structure, function, or history.
It is not about how or what academics think public diplomacy is as they
construct mind-castles in the air filled with jargon no self-respecting
practitioner would take the time to wade through. It is very simply how several of today’s experienced
State Department officers have dealt with real world public diplomacy situations.
These experiences have varied widely from country to country although certain
commonalities – challenges and opportunities – can be seen through their
writings to have recurred across the globe.

This book is built around case studies presented by several
US public diplomacy specialists themselves followed by a series of interviews
with others involved in helping improve America’s image abroad.

Several of these case studies are controversial – or at
least represent unique occurrences in atypical situations. How often, for instance, is a US Consulate or
Embassy situated in a city where a World Expo is about to take place and the
Consul General finds him or, in the case of Shanghai, herself faced with an intransigent
Washington bureaucracy and politicians unable to think out of an outdated Congressionally-limited
funding box constructed thirty years before?
Or how often does an Embassy place at the top of its agenda a small
youth exchange program that will need to last for years on end to prove
effectiveness?

Or how many times does an Embassy transition from a public
affairs strategy run by the US military in a country where US occupation forces
have just left – namely Iraq - to a peacetime one administered by civilian State
Department officers where a civil war is still in progress. In all three cases, the answer is not very
often.

The commonalities

In contrast, most, if not all, of these case studies discuss
how Embassy public diplomacy officers have used, or attempted to use, the
social media and how they have reached, or attempted to reach, beyond fortress embassy
walls to communicate with local publics especially youth despite the high walls
and loss of American Centers in the countries of their assignment.

Truth be told, I find the closure of many American Centers
in the 1990s to have been a “penny-wise-pound-foolish” approach to public
diplomacy especially to communicating with and servicing the needs of youth –
and their replacement by American Corners, or small installations (without
Americans) of books, periodicals and presumably Internet access ensconced in
someone else’s library a less than satisfactory solution.

Do understand, the American Corners idea is not new. As
Cultural Affairs Officer in Manila I had to evaluate a raft of them in the
Philippines in the 1990s just as our budget was starting to collapse and there
were fewer resources available to devote to them. Yet the “ultimate solution” – after I left –
was to close the respected American Cultural Center located in the heart of
Manila’s commercial districtv- used by myriads of Filipinos from students to
legislators and professors - and give away its 30,000 volume collection to a
private university in a suburb. The by then truncated staff was moved inside
the fortified Embassy.

Friday, 12 October 2012

Prime Minister David Cameron closed the Conservative Party Conference with a reaffirmation of the faith of a “compassionate” Conservative. It was as if the gods in their infinite compassion for their creation had come down from Eton to dwell among their unwashed Plebs, there to take up the gentleman's burden to spread privilege through loving discipline.

Objectively, it was the climax to a conference all about the Conservative Party repositioning to the Conservative Right in order to at least preserve as many seats as possible -- if not win an outright majority-- in a general election that may come even sooner than 2015. His partners, the Liberal Democrats, did not receive a single mention. In construction it was almost in its entirety a response to Labour Leader Ed Milliband's thrown gauntlet.

In short, the fight is on.

It was also a pitch for confidence in Cameron's leadership at a time when Cameron's Party is not so sure.

Subjectively I saw the speech as illustrating the very theme of out of touch, privileged public school boy Cameron hoped to dispel.

Cameron confirmed he wants to remake British education in the image of his own at Eton. He argued this proved a commitment to "spread" privilege not protect it. But in the very telling, Cameron assumed privilege was what everyone of any value to society wants.

Conservatives recommit to staying the course

Cameron argued the government is “on the right track.” Yes, it is difficult. Challenging in fact. In fact, if Britain doesn’t do what Cameron wants, Britain will be left behind, to idle in the economic backwaters, history. Cameron argued he and the Conservative Party were the Party of “doers,” on the side of doers (aka “strivers” aka “aspiration nation” Britain).

The verdict of a "Striver"

I was until my retirement one of Cameron's "doers." I routinely worked 70-80 hours per week. I worked hard. I strove to serve, to be responsible, to make a difference. The point isn’t “what a good boy am I.” The point is, I was and am the kind of person Mr. Cameron says he is for, for whom Cameron says he speaks.

But Mr. Cameron does not speak for me.

Cameron’s policies aren’t policies I endorse. They do not please me. I do not find his words honeyed. I find them twisted.

I find his actions more twisted than his words.

I know Cameron does nothing to make work pay. He calculates people like me will be pleased he is cutting other people's resources below the lowest paid in British working society.

I know he does nothing for British business. Arguing for an unbridled license to fire will not improve the British economy.

Nor will it make work pay.

How does trading employment rights for shares in a start up that probably will fail, valued by the entrepreneur who may fire at will, make work pay? It doesn’t.

How does glutting the job market with qualified people who can't find full time work make work pay? It doesn't. How does cutting pensions making work pay? It doesn't.

Cameron is actually depressing wages in the blind pursuit of a doctrine he calls “competitiveness” with developing nations.

As for Cameron's self-vaunted “compassion,” he confuses a gentleman’s "noblesse obligee" with compassion. The "Gentleman's Burden" hasn't changed since early Victorian times, as Ian Hyslop demonstrated just the night before Cameron's speech in a BBC programme on the British "stiff upper lip."

The disabled are not Ian Duncan Smith's gentleman’s burden. They aren't the wayward "work-shy" for Cameron and Smith to “reform.” They are disabled.

Activists claim an estimated 10,600 disabled have died after a government ATOS work assessment found them “fit for work.” Whatever the actuals may turn out to be, both BBC Panorama and Channel 4 Dispatches exposed the provable deceptiveness of the process 71 days prior to Cameron's speech. Everyone in ATOS, the Cabinet and Britain are "on notice" of that and that it has caused actual damage, possibly contributed to premature deaths, almost certainly contributed to suicides, and without a doubt has been incorrect as to thousands assessed.

The jobless are not jobless because degenerate and lacking in a gentleman's discipline. A third of the work force not only cannot get full time work, they have no reasonable prospect of getting it any time in the foreseeable future. Even the IMF rates growth under Cameron's sacred Plan A at the lowest of any developed nation.

It isn’t even noblesse obligee.

It is delusion. It is unconscionable demeaning of the disabled in order to pave the way to degrade the social infrastructure that undergirds British society. It is, to use straight Anglo-Saxon, wrong.

It isn't really fooling anyone.

The clear reality even to Conservatives of many years standing, who are not a part of Cameron’s in crowd, is that the Conservative Party under Cameron will discard anyone as a “something for nothing” drag on their position when that person has no further use to offer them. The British public seem to be figuring this out, as reflected in the widening Labour poll lead. Even business seems to now realize there is no light at the end of the long tunnel into which Cameron and his Party lead.

There is only a deep and profoundly cold darkness in which even the light of conscience itself extinguishes.

Tuesday, 09 October 2012

Picture him: shoulders hunched, body lurching forward, maniacal grin, eyes bugging out as if, Mormon elder or not, he was hyped on some powerful upper. Add the voice, soft, sweet, calculated, the voice of a hit man sadistically caressing his opponent, who seemed to shrink in size as the bully attacked again and again, interrupting hapless moderator Jim Lehrer, interrupting the baffled and defensive Barack Obama. Toward the middle of the encounter, realizing no doubt that he was well on the way to being declared the winner of the debate, Romney’s fixed smile turned into the more familiar smirk, the characteristic expression of the financial masters of the world (think Jamie Dimon) among whom the Bain takeover artist clearly believes he should be counted.

The Mismatch

Did anyone else notice a curious disjunction? On the one hand, Romney’s aggressive body language and his determination to dominate the debate. On the other, his claim of having been a model of amiable collegiality as governor of Massachusetts. “I had the great experience—it didn't seem like it at the time—of being elected in a state where my legislature was 87 percent Democrat. And that meant I figured out from day one I had to get along and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done.” So now, he says, he’s ready to play nicely with Democrats in Congress. “We need to have leadership—leadership in Washington that will actually bring people together and get the job done....I've done it before. I'll do it again.”

Ahem. Do what again? Unfortunately for ex-governor of Massachusetts Romney, history isn’t totally malleable. According an extensively documented piece in the New York Times, “no one else seems to remember Romney as a teddybear in those days.” He was “aloof" and “uncommunicative” and “bipartisanship was in short supply.” He vetoed innumerable legislative initiatives, and “statehouse Democrats complained he variously ignored, insulted or opposed them, with intermittent charm offensives.”

Which To Trust?

My conclusion? Romney’s aggressive body language during Wednesday’s debate on economic policy is a better predictor of future behavior than his most recent charm offensive, his honied words, his amazingly successful (for now) effort to overcome his likeability deficit, despite his boorish insistence on having the first word, the last word and as many words in between as possible. Maybe Americans like bullies. Goodness knows, there are enough of them terrorizing America’s playgrounds.

But, you rightly ask, what did Romney say? What’s his policy? That’s the important thing. Yes, it is. And once again the debate exposed a glaring disparity between the torrents of smooth talk, reiterated falsifications and vague generalities we’ve become familiar with and the few bald statements that he put his heart and soul into.